


tried to touch you where it hurt

by PaxDuane



Series: lift your glasses full of sunshine [2]
Category: Star Wars Legends: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss
Genre: Cultural Differences, Developing Relationship, Dorks in Love, M/M, Rivals to Lovers, allusions to sex, brief Jango Fett, brief Kal Skirata, brief other Nulls, kind of, minor original clone/original clone, taking repcomm characters and ignoring their characterization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29204502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxDuane/pseuds/PaxDuane
Summary: but I couldn't find the bruise--Yes, And -by Molly ofGeographyKal'buir always talked about there being differences between them and the other clones, between them and the Alphas especially.Ordo's not sure he was talking about how they work things out, or how they interact, or how Maze kisses him.Yeah, he's pretty sure Kal'buir wasn't talking aboutthat one.
Relationships: Alpha-26 | Maze/Null-11 | Ordo Skirata
Series: lift your glasses full of sunshine [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144181
Comments: 9
Kudos: 22





	tried to touch you where it hurt

**Author's Note:**

> [Theme song!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg_g1iFq_gc)
> 
> Allusions to sex but nothing clear. They're the equivalents of like. 16.

Kal’buir almost actively encourages them to treat the other clones as their rivals. Only the other nulls are their brothers, everyone else is below them, no matter that Bajir Fett can beat Buir to a pulp without breaking a sweat and has taught the A-class just as well.

But Ordo buys into it, buys into the superiority, until one day Bajir Fett gets sick of the low grade warfare between his students and the Nulls, the Nulls really only surviving because they’re sneaky and few, and calls for a joint exercise.

It’s the six Nulls, all four of Wal’buir’s skinny Delta squad, and ten squads for Alphas. Seven of the Alpha groups are ten to a group, but all three others are only nine.

All four of Delta go to groups of 10, as do the three of Ordo’s more...temperamental brothers. He expects Jaing to have at least three broken bones by the end of the month. Kom’rk and Mereel, probably both eyes blackened. Purdii has a look of surprise as his group of nine folds him in with laughter and jokes. A’den’s is accusingly silent but not as visibly plotting as the groups of ten who got Nulls.

Ordo purses his lips at the nine he’s been assigned to. One sits on a crate, the only one of the nine sitting, and flicks a kark-you-kindly at him.

“For one month, you’ll all be living with each other, working with each other, and surviving each other,” Bajir Fett calls from the front of the gymnasium. “You will have no contact with the other groups.”

There’s a scoff. Ordo shuts his eyes and sighs because he’s almost positive that was Jaing.

Bajir smiles, tight. One of the Alphas next to him shuffles. “After all, it’s going to be hard enough to reach us. Since you’ll all be on uninhabited but still survivable planets.”

Ordo sucks in a breath, looks around. The Alphas all knew; Kal’Buir and Wal’buir look like they knew and so do the little Deltas. Why hadn’t Kal’buir told _them_?

There’s a little hum, behind him, and he looks over his shoulder to the clone on the crate, who looks at him appraisingly.

He bristles and frowns, then jerks back to look ahead when Bajir starts explaining mission parameters.

This is going to be a long month.

The clone who had sat on the crate was A-26, Ordo only learns on the short hop they’re taking to their destination. A-26, nicknamed Maze.

For all that Maze seems to be the leader of this little band, with Ordo circling the edges, he has some strange habits. It’s not that he likes sitting—the moment they got the cue to head onto a ship he was bounding ahead, faster than Ordo expected and...bouncy—but he seems to like being situated below the rest of their heads. On the ship, with everyone else seated, he either sits on the floor or, at one point when one of the other Alphas had dropped some in-joke, sprawled out against the metal to laugh then stayed there.

He’s thinner than the others, like he can’t keep weight on no matter that they were apparently given the same amount of food as the eleven-clone units because he eats enough for two.

Every once in a while, when he’s been trying to catalogue the relationships between the nine again and coming up short, he ends up meeting Maze’s eyes and averting his gaze.

It’s a jungle moon, that they end up on. Balmy and green, with trees taller than he could have expected. Camp gets set up as soon as the ship leaves.

“Oh, you can bunk with Maze,” 42 drawls, when he’s about to ask. “You’ll be practically on your own, like how you like it.”

He puzzles at the other, mainly on why he assumed he’d like to be alone but also on why he’d be practically on his own. Still, he takes the dolled out tent and is shooed off to the edge of camp.

He glances around, not sure where he should expect to find Maze, only to nearly jump out of his skin as the other clone drops down from high in a tree.

“Did they seriously send you to find me already?” Maze asks while Ordo looks back and forth between him and the expansive mass of green he dropped from.

Ordo raises an eyebrow at him. “42 just sent me over here with the tent.”

Maze rolls his eyes. Ordo’s never seen Bajir Fett make many faces, hasn’t seen the Alphas with more than outrage on their faces, so he’s not sure to do with this expressive aberration. “Bund.”

“Bund?” he asks.

Maze looks surprised. “Chalactani—asshole. Bajir uses it around the other bajire.”

“Why Chalactani?” He follows as Maze picks through the brush to a clearing a bit away from the others. “All the way out here? What about your brothers?”

Maze frowns. “Brothers?”

“Uh. The other Alphas.”

“Oh, like how you Nulls are all brothers. We don’t tend to treat each other that way.”

“You... don’t?”

“We’re fellow soldiers at worst and friends at best.” Maze shrugs. “The only thing that could make us brothers is Bajir, but Bajir isn’t our buir, he’s our teacher. We’re all students. There are many of us, after all.”

“...Friends.” He loves his brothers, but he’s never once thought he could be friends with them. Well, maybe A’den, but even then they fight like brothers—until Buir breaks them up.”

“And Chalacti because Bajir is part Chalacti. Among other things. I picked up Chalacti, Spar picked up Togruta, 17 can argue pretty well in Rhyl.”

“And Mando’a?”

“Oh we all speak Mando’a.” Maze smirks. “We are just not limited to that and Basic.”

Ordo hopes every bit of how unimpressed he is shows on his face.

Maze cocks his heads, curls waving a little in a way that means they must be a little longer than regulation. Buir would throw a fit. “Well, come on. I’ll help set it up.”

After the tent is up, Maze disappears again until latemeal rations are passed out, then again until the star is well under the horizon. Ordo, in the dim light of a stellar powered lantern, was beginning to wonder if he was going to sleep in the trees.

“You’re still awake?” Maze asks, shucking off his fatigues as he climbs in.

Ordo stares for a moment, in the dim, at how his back muscles move as he unrolls the other bedroll. “I don’t usually sleep in a space by myself.

Maze sprawls out beside him. “Really? Doesn’t that get lonely?”

His brow furrows with his confusion. “Lonely?”

“Yeah, you don’t get to process anything. Bajir’s always made sure we have spaces we can go to, to get alone and process. We’d be with each other all the time, otherwise. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love spending time with my friends and we tend to sleep in piles in the dormitories if he doesn’t bring it up, which he only does if the Kaminiise are going inspecting, but...” Maze’s gaze is warm on him. “Maybe that’s why you all tend to feed on each other.”

“What?”

“Sleep well, we have quite the hike in the morning,” Maze says, flicking off the lantern and plunging them into darkness.

“...bund,” Ordo mumbles, then smiles to himself as Maze muffles a snigger.

“Kark,” Ordo curses, bouncing against the rock face and scrabbling for another hold as Maze helps brace him. “What the kriff was that?”

“Duck!” 62 calls, just before he falls, scrabbling with some strange animal.

Ordo watches, horrified and unable to help, as he falls past him, towards the dark, swirling water below.

62 disappears under the water with the creature and for a moment they’re all holding their breaths. Then he surfaces again, creature nowhere in sight. “I’m good!”

“You better well be!” Maze calls, somewhere between exasperated and worried.

“I got the thing off our lines,” 62 hollers back. “Could use some thanks!”

“I’ll give you a handie later,” Sipher snaps, grumpy faced as he starts to make his way down the other side of the waterfall.

Maze snickers. “Handie, yeah right, he’s gonna kark him till he knows he’s still there.” There’s laughter, yes, but there’s also a level of resignation. Sipher and 62 were the first Ordo figured out were together. It wasn’t that they were particularly loud—they’re not. It’s more that Sipher’s best friend was particularly loud about pointing out a hickey over breakfast. Maze is the leader of this bunch, so Ordo’s not surprised that would have been a sacrifice that wouldn’t have ended well, in the end.

He doesn’t love them like brothers, like Ordo loves the other Nulls. He loves them like they’re his responsibility. Before this, he wouldn’t have known the difference.

Once they’re all on solid ground, Sipher about tackles 62 back into the water with a snarl, but they come up laughing and, dare he say it, in love.

Maze half-smiles and shakes his head and his eyes find Ordo’s as he decides this is as good a place as any.

Ordo sits with him, setting a fire, while he directs a few of the others to drag the creature’s corpse up and attempt to see if it’s edible.

As the sky darkens, the warm light of the fire catches the edges of Maze’s cheeks, of his mouth when he talks and laughs. It’s only as he drags him back to their tent as the conversation winds down that it occurs to Ordo to ask.

“Can I kiss you?”

Maze’s expression is surprised, even in the near pitch that is darkness under the canopy. “You’d sink to that?” he teases, but his mouth moves like it’s much more complicated. “Yes, you can kiss me.”

Maze tastes like smoke from taking one of the most burnt chunks of the creature they’d had for dinner, and like saliva and tongue and he can’t find it in himself to hate those tastes as he might of in a game of “would you rather” with his brothers.

Maze plasters himself to his chest, as they’re falling asleep. If it were Mereel or A’den, he’d let them fall off in the night. But it’s not, and he tucks his arm around the side of the other man that’s not all the way on him. He wakes up with hair in his mouth, ready to be snappy, and instead finds himself frozen until Maze blinks up sleepily at him.

Morning breath is sour, kind of disgusting, but Maze’s lips are soft and he’s pliant as Ordo slowly flips them, pressing his back into the ground and hovering over him, kissing him again and again like he’s the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted.

When he finally pulls back, he just wants to brand the moment in his memory, of Maze panting and eyes half open, with their fingers tangled together up by his head and just radiant, truly and utterly radiant.

“Things to do,” he murmurs, no matter that he wants to stay sprawled on the bedroll with Maze, kissing him and touching his bare chest and maybe going further.

Maze surges up to kiss him again, just briefly. “Things to do.”

The pool of the waterfall doesn’t attach to a river, not above ground, so they have to track it down elsewhere. That takes a day, with Ordo doing his best to keep up with Maze as the Alpha scouts. After midmeal, though, he takes to joining the couple of Alphas that are doing ground patrol as a sort of tether to Maze’s near-mad jaunt through the canopy.

It’s beautiful up there, and they’d spotted the river quickly, but picking a path from where they were to where they needed to get was going to take a lot of work and, in the end, Maze had the stamina for it.

So he’s content to help pick through the ground cover and direct the others to their destination.

The jungle does have its surprises. One serpent nearly takes a bite out of Carce, two more of those creatures make a grand attempt to kill them, and his heart nearly stops when a branch Maze pauses on cracks and creaks, nearly stops even as he shoots forward to catch him.

Maze’s heart beats wildly and he can feel it through his own chest. “Well,” Maze says lightly, as Ordo helps him back on solid ground and can feel his shaking, “That could have been bad.”

“Yeah,” 42 drawls, “If your boyfriend hadn’t caught you, we wouldn’t have had a scout and we’d have had to drag your broken legged ass to the extraction site.”

Maze and Ordo both sputter.

“We—what...I...” Ordo stares at him.

Maze, however, settles into a look of practiced patience. “Hey 42?”

“I’m running, I’m running.” The lackadaisical Alpha takes off back towards the rest of the group.

Ordo slips his hand into Maze’s. “Come on, you were saying we were nearly there?”

It’s three days of hiking, as they follow the river, before they reach the ruined city where their objective lays. One of those days wouldn’t have been quite so bad except they woke up to rain and had to spend their time getting their things away from the river. It means they reach the city with nightfall and find a still mostly stable building to set up camp in.

“We have two more tendays to find the artifact, contain it, and wait for extraction,” Maze calculates over the cooking fire in what might have once been a courtyard. Since 42 made it clear that all of the others had quickly figured them out, he’s taken to settling between Ordo’s knees, using his thighs like the arms of a chair.

“It seems a little long,” Ordo says, frowns, still a little awkward about threading his fingers through Maze’s hair around everyone but bolstered in that 62 and Sipher are far more open about their public displays of affection.

42 shrugs. “For the ones with Delta, it’s to keep them confident but, you know, alive. For the ones with your brothers it’s to see if some of us will snap and just murder them.”

“Huh.” Ordo feels a little spark of concern for Jaing.

“Though, Bajir did warn us to not do anything that couldn’t be fixed, so murder probably won’t happen,” 42 adds, giving him a sloppy two fingered salute that he’s starting to understand is just how 42 smiles.

“Good for that, at least,” Ordo grumbles. “Some of my brothers are...”

“The self preservation of people who think death can’t touch them,” Carce says. He’d been fast, so fast, getting away from that serpent and killing it.

Ordo realizes, dimly, that he’s never lost anyone. There may have been twelve in their batch, but six didn’t make it to decanting; they never knew those brothers. And he knows from early memories that the Alphas started out at an even 100 and are now down to 97.

He leans down to press his lips against Maze’s curls.

The city is in ruins, but it’s still got structure enough that they pick their way through it over the next four days. It’s kind of a game, exploring it, like how they did back on Kamino when they were blues.

Stairs are taken carefully, sometimes climbed over where rails are more stable than the steps. Doorways are shaken, first, to see if the rooves will fall down. At one point, a walkway cracks and nearly sends three of them into the tunnels below.

It’s all pale brown stone, but it’s smooth and thin, weathered down but still strong. The ruins of a spire don’t even pierce higher than the canopy, so it feels like a bowl of brown set into green.

The nights are spent around courtyard campfires before slipping back into little houses where they’ve set up their bedrolls. 62 and Sipher have the one furthest away, though Maze and Ordo have been similarly banished more for the expectation of the same reason.

Maybe if they weren’t both puzzling late into the night over their building map to figure out where the artifact is.

Also, if 62 and Sipher weren’t who they’d have to ask for supplies.

Eventually, they track the thing down in what looks like a normal house until you step inside and there’s a story’s worth flight of stairs into what amounts to a very fancy pit. The roof of the place is crumbling, sending light in that catches on a glimmer of blue and white that practically glows on its own, shifts from blue to pale red, then pale yellow in a kaleidoscope. And then, as they make their way down the stares, it just...

Stops.

It still glimmers softly, in its shape like an animals rib cage, thin like a feline, somewhere in the middle of Tooka and Nexu, and with a shock cluster of the same crystal about where the heart would be. 

Carce readies the backpack to put it into, stuffed with extra cloth because Bajir Fett had warned them of its possible fragility.

As Ordo and 62 urge it off of its altar, into the bag, a voice says, “Hello, then.”

They all exchange a look.

“Yeah, nope,” Maze says, tipping it fully into the bag and zipping it up. “Not dealing with that.”

“So, twenty days. What do we do now?” 42 asks.

Ordo grunts from where he’s buried his face in Maze’s neck. He smells like roasted carob and giggles when Ordo nuzzles closer.

“Well we all know what they’re going to do,” Carce snips, tossing a ration bar wrapper at 62 and Sipher. “Four out of ten, damn.”

One of the others snorts. “You’re just mad because 22 is in Spar’s group.”

Maze winces at that. “I hope they’re okay.”

“What, do they not get along?” Ordo asks.

“Oh, they get along fine. And they’ve got one of the Deltas, so they’ll be fine. Spar just has chronic migraines. I think they got sent to a planet with long nights, so hopefully he’ll be alright,” Carce says.

Maze sighs. “Hopefully. Otherwise he’s going to be near catatonic in the infirmary back room for like a week.”

Ordo hums, sympathetic concern edging his mind.

Maze scratches his blunt nails along the back of his neck, where it’s starting to grow out already.

“I figure,” Sipher interjects, “We have twenty days to hunt some neat animals and figure out how to properly cook them, swim around the river, and just have fun.”

“I could go for a swim,” Maze adds, tone just edging on sly. “Ordo?”

Ordo considers it; it’s a little strange to think of it—of his first time being slipping away from a group that knows fully what they’re going to do and hold no judgement, just friendly teasing. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

They get up, to the jeers that they answer with smirks and rude gestures, to go off to the river while the star still hangs in the sky and don’t stumble back until just after dark.

The month was not long enough, but by the time the trainers land in the city to load them back up, Ordo’s hair is lighter and his skin is a shade or two darker. He has a bite mark on his inner thigh, from a very hands on demonstration of how their scent glands work, and scratches down his back and he knows the _sounds_ Maze makes.

Coming back to Kamino isn’t the same. It’s nice to be back with his brothers (Jaing has a broken nose, two blackened eyes, and apparently got treated for three breaks in his arm on the way back; Kom’rk only has one black eye, but Mereel very much has two) but he quickly comes to miss the comradery with the Alphas.

It’s free time and a couple of his brothers are off causing mischief, a few days after they all get back, when Ordo picks his way to the Alpha dormitories. He pauses in the doorway, unsure with the collection in the common room holding none he’s familiar with.

“Ordo, right?” one lounging on a beat up looking couch with a holonovel in hand. “The group that ran with you told us you’re cool; you looking for them?”

“Yeah, uh. Is Maze around?”

“Ha, yeah. Maze! Your boyfriend’s here!”

A flurry of curses, smooth with the accent Maze takes with Chalactani but none he can pick out specifically from when Maze was teaching him simply because of the pace, then Maze is swanning out of a room and smacking the one on the couch upside the head. “Shut, bastard.”

He sticks his tongue out, then sets about ignoring them.

Maze smiles at Ordo. “Hey.”

“Hey,” he breathes.

“Come on,” Maze says, taking him by the hand, “Sipher was talking about the fish, again, and I need someone to back me up.”

Ordo smiles broadly and follows. “Of course.”

**Author's Note:**

> Bund is actually Punjabi for ass, because I'm not making up a language wholesale for a a culture based on Not My Culture. I tend to grab Chalactani from Sanskrit, Bengali, Punjabi, and sometimes Farsi.
> 
> I really liked exploring the differences in how clones raised by a "father" would be compared to ones raised by a "teacher", ones raised to be brothers versus ones raised as classmates, fellow soldiers, and possible friends.


End file.
